Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary says “natural immunity wins again” after reading the latest New England Journal of Medicine study on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations.
The NEJM study was conducted by a bunch of physicians with more degrees between them than an overheated engine. They concluded:
Infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) provides natural immunity against reinfection. Recent studies have shown waning of the immunity provided by the BNT162b2 vaccine.
Put into English, catching COVID provides longer-lasting immunity than the Pfizer vaccine.
I’m reporting this news exclusively to our VIP subscribers because if I make this scientific knowledge available to the general public, there’s a very good chance all of PJ Media will get squeezed — hard — by various social media giants.
The authors studied the Israeli Ministry of Health database, looking at COVID patients from August and September of 2021. That’s when the delta variant was still predominant and long enough ago for a real risk of reinfection to emerge, particularly after November when the super-infectious omicron variant began to dominate caseloads.
The study did not look at “unvaccinated persons who have not been previously infected,” because with Israel’s high vaccination rate, that “cohort is small and not representative of the overall population.”
So they had a database of virtually everybody who’d caught COVID over a two-month period in a highly vaccinated population… which, come to think of it, is an important data point in itself.
Anyway, the authors found “evidence of waning immunity in all cohorts, with a steady decrease in protection over time” that was “evident across all age groups.”
Even with that waning immunity, “after several months, persons with hybrid immunity were better protected against reinfection than uninfected persons who had previously received two doses of vaccine.”
In other words, the best way not to catch COVID is to get fully vaccinated — and then catch COVID regardless. Then and only then will you enjoy maximum protection from the virus you’ve already had.
Also for our VIPs: Joe Biden and the Optics of Failure
I got fully vaxxed with Pfizer when it first became available to my cohort (as a 52-year-old male at the time) willingly but without enthusiasm.
And for only two reasons.
The first was that early studies showed that the vaccinated were less likely to spread COVID, and I wanted to mitigate any risk to my in-laws, both well into their 70s. Later studies showed that the lesser transmission benefit reduced greatly over a short amount of time, and then my fully vaxxed-and-boosted in-laws caught omicron regardless.
The second was that I didn’t want to risk losing my sense of smell (and most of my sense of taste) for weeks or months. But with omicron, that’s no longer a common COVID symptom.
And with omicron generally not doing anything worse than giving people a seriously nasty sore throat for a few days, I haven’t bothered with any booster shots.
Untold millions of people can be thankful for Trump’s “medical miracle.” While vaccines don’t seem to have done much to prevent infections over the medium term, in the short term they were probably effective enough to protect those in the most vulnerable age and health cohorts.
That’s true, even if the protection only lasted long enough for the mild omicron variant to become dominant.
Now that the “sore throat variant” has taken over, and given the proven strength of natural immunity, maybe even the 24/7 COVID Panic Brigade will learn to chill out.
I can dream, can’t I?
